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Tuesday, December 22, 2015

"The case for not trusting science." reports Robert Gebelhoff, contributes to The Washington Post's Opinions section.

Some of the world’s notable physicists are pictured at the fifth Solvay International Conference, in 1927 in Brussels.Photo: Washington Post

Max Planck won a Nobel prize for his
revolutionary work in quantum mechanics, but it was his interest in the
philosophy of science that led to what is now called “Planck’s
Principle.”Planck argued
that science was an evolving system of thought which changes slowly over
time, fueled by the deaths of old ideas. As he wrote in his 1968
autobiography: “A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing
its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its
opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar
with it.”His insight
poses a jarring question: Is our understanding of the world based in
pure objective reason, or are the theories that underpin it shaped by
generational biases? Do our most famous thinkers actually block new
ideas from gaining ground?[Many scientific studies can’t be replicated. That’s a problem.]A new paper published by the National Bureau of Economic Research suggests that fame does play a
significant role in deciding when and whether new scientific ideas can
gain traction. When a prominent scientist dies, the paper’s authors
found, the number of articles published by his or her collaborators
tends to fall “precipitously” in the years following the death — those
supporters tend not to continue advocating for a once-famous scientist’s
ideas once the scientist is gone.At the same time, the number of research articles written by other scientists — including those with opposing ideas —
increases by 8 percent on average, implying that the work of these
scientists had been stifled before, but that after the death of a
ubiquitous figure, the field becomes more open to new ideas. The study
also found that these new articles are less likely to cite previous
research and are more likely to be cited by others in the field. Death
signifies a changing of the guard — the study illustrates the scramble to fill an intellectual void with new ideas and scientific inquiry.

Our instinct is often to view science
as a concrete tower, growing ever upward and built upon the immovable
foundations of earlier pioneers. Sir Isaac Newton famously
characterized this as “standing on the shoulders of giants.” The
reality, however, seems to suggest that scientific thought is less
stable than we think.

Mid-20th century philosopher Thomas Kuhn was among the first to come to this conclusion, in his 1962 book “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.”
He argued that scientific theories appeared in punctuated “paradigm
shifts,” in which the underlying assumptions of a field are questioned
and eventually overthrown.

The famous historical example is astronomy:
Our understanding of the universe shifted from Ptolemy, who believed
that Earth was the center of the universe, to Copernicus, who argued
that it was the sun. Later, the Copernican reign was overthrown by
Brahe, and again by Kepler, Galileo, Newton and so on.Kuhn’s
book was, to some extent, a paradigm shift in its own right. According
to his logic, commonly held notions in science were bound to change and
become outdated. What we believe today will tomorrow be revised,
rewritten — andin the most extreme cases ridiculed.Read more...

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Hello, my name is Helge Scherlund and I am the Education Editor and Online Educator of this personal weblog and the founder of eLearning • Computer-Mediated Communication Center.
I have an education in the teaching adults and adult learning from Roskilde University, with Computer-Mediated Communication (CMC) and Human Resource Development (HRD) as specially studied subjects. I am the author of several articles and publications about the use of decision support tools, e-learning and computer-mediated communication. I am a member of The Danish Mathematical Society (DMF), The Danish Society for Theoretical Statistics (DSTS) and an individual member of the European Mathematical Society (EMS). Note: Comments published here are purely my own and do not reflect those of my current or future employers or other organizations.